Thank you, San Marino!

This goes out to the security guards, the policemen, the honest workers that every once in a while get together to play in San Marino’s national team. They did it again on Wednesday evening, when offered the Romanian national team yet another chance of a fresh start, under the recently appointed head coach Victor Piturca. The match that ended with a 1-0 win for our national team was helpful for a lot of reasons and you can find some below:

Showed us exactly where we are at this point: slightly better than one of the worst national teams in the world.

Offered another strong reason to get rid of some of our “star players”, with Adrian Mutu and Gabriel Tamas excluded from the national team after returning late to the hotel from a few hours break offered by Piturca.

Helped the always generous Banel Nicolita fulfill yet another dream, as he wore the armband on his 31st cap.

Proved to Piturca that 75% of those called up to refresh the national team cannot play better here than they are doing at club level. What a surprise!

Made the coach think very seriously about avoiding the same mistake done by his predecessor, Razvan Lucescu, who was called to rebuild the squad in the middle of a campaign and decided to defy the odds and fight for a qualifying spot, having to rebuild at the beginning of the next one, when he should have had the team ready to go.

Wow. Slightly better than the worst team in the world? You come to this conclusion over a friendly with a coach rebuilding a program in his first game? Makes a lot of sense. Who cares what the score was. This is soccer!

I was hoping you’ll get the irony. Anyway, I strongly believe that unless the players and the coaches change their opinions about themselves, we won’t get back to a good level as a team in the coming years…

Anyway, I strongly believe that unless the players and the coaches change their opinions about themselves, we won’t get back to a good level as a team in the coming years…
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How can they do that when people like you, and the media, constantly criticize them?

Also… when you are using something in quotation marks, the comma goes inside the quotation mark. Example: “star players”, should be “star players,”

Radu Baicu

• 15 years of continuous work in scouting, for top clubs and companies;
• Worked for clubs like Bayer 04 Leverkusen and Hannover 96, covering the Romanian market;
• Worked for Birmingham based company ‘The Scouting Network’ (www.tsn.co.uk) as a football scout;
• Worked for Zurich based company Boutique Football as a scouting network coordinator;
• International scout for Young Boys Bern for 2 years, covering Eastern European football.
• Working for the past 5 years as an international scout for a top French club.